Ben Elton - Two Brothers

Helmut was making no effort to lower his tone and one or two of the other drinkers in the bar were beginning to shift about, casting aggressive glances in his direction. They looked away again, however, when Helmut ostentatiously displayed the black and red badge ringed with gold that was pinned on his lapel.

‘Come on,’ Helmut said. ‘If you’re not officially working here, you can take the evening off, can’t you? Let me buy you dinner. There’s no one here I’m interested in anyway. Did you ever see an uglier bunch?’

‘Dinner? You want to eat with me ?’

‘That’s right, a Jew and queer, eh? The SS would love that, wouldn’t they? Perhaps we can plot an assassination attempt.’

At first Wolfgang was astonished at Helmut’s provocative behaviour, but he soon recognized that it was not so very surprising and certainly not brave. The Nazis respected nothing more than authority, and as a senior SA man close to Ernst Röhm, Helmut was invulnerable. Wolfgang decided therefore to try and relax for an hour or two and enjoy a free dinner.

After all, he could be in no safer company in all of Berlin.

And besides, there was something he very much wanted to ask Helmut. He raised it the moment they had sat down in a cosy little restaurant and ordered their drinks and food.

‘Do you ever see Katharina?’ Wolfgang asked.

A shadow of sadness passed across Helmut’s habitually amused countenance.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you were rather in love with her, weren’t you?’

‘Was it that obvious?’

‘Glaring, my dear. Glaring. And who can blame you? Katharina, lovely Katharina, she was such a very exquisite creature. Loveliest of them all.’

‘Was?’ Wolfgang asked, the shadow passing from Helmut’s face to his own.

‘Yes — was, I’m afraid,’ Helmut replied, staring sadly into his Martini.

‘Helmut. Please don’t tell me she’s dead.’

‘No. Not dead. Not yet. I don’t think so anyway. But she’s been very ill for years. Not a nice condition at all; sad to say, she has syphilis.’

‘Oh my God. Not Katharina.’

‘It’s quite advanced and so of course she’s rather disfigured. Such terrible luck. You know how reserved she was, never loose at all, not like most of us that year. She told me it was one mistake. A film producer. She wanted to be an actress, you recall.’

‘Yes, I recall.’

Wolfgang felt such pain. Real physical pain. Katharina was his secret. The funny, wistful little might-have-been that he kept hidden in a box somewhere deep in his heart. He scarcely even looked into the box any more. He had plenty else to worry about, after all. But it was always there, a sweet memory of something beautiful that had passed him by.

‘I’m sorry, Wolfgang,’ Helmut said, sniffing the wine the waiter had offered him. ‘I know how much she meant to you… you didn’t ever… did you?’

‘No, no, we didn’t,’ Wolfgang said, ‘but not for want of desire on my part. I tried one night, when I was drunk, but she put me in my place. She didn’t sleep with married men.’

‘For which you should be very grateful. You may have had a lucky escape. Life is undoubtedly unfair and cruel and swinish.’

The waiter brought the soup and they ate for a few moments in silence.

‘What more can I tell you?’ Helmut went on. ‘She pretty much retired from everything and went to live with her mother. I saw her about a year or two ago. The symptoms were in remission but she was very scarred.’

‘I should like to see her.’

‘I very very much doubt she would want that, Wolfgang. Besides…’

Helmut left the sentence hanging where it was while he studied the diamond on his cigarette case. He didn’t need to say more. It was pretty obvious that the last thing any distressed girl needed was a Jew trying to befriend her.

Wolfgang could be of no help to anyone. Not Katharina, not his family, not himself.

‘Best to remember her as she was, don’t you think?’ Helmut said. ‘Beautiful, captivating Katharina.’

They ate their meal together. Sharing happier memories of the great and glorious Joplin Club, memories which for Wolfgang were destined always now to be suffused with an intolerable sadness.

It was certainly no consolation that all the other members of Kurt’s old gang were doing very well in the newly awoken Germany. Dorf the bookish money launderer was now with Schacht at the Reichsbank.

‘Still juggling debt,’ Helmut laughed. ‘The only difference is that now he does it while he’s sober. And you remember Hans? Believe it or not, he’s also at exactly the same game as he was in 1923. Acquiring expensive motor cars on the cheap from those who find they have to liquidate their assets urgently.’

Wolfgang nodded. Wondering how many of those fine cars that had pulled up outside the Kempinski hotel for the Fischers’ ‘farewell’ party a year before had since been bought short and sold long by his old friend Hans. The Fischer Mercedes probably amongst them.

‘And Helene, of course,’ Helmut went on. ‘You remember dear sparkling Helene? She is the star of us all, still passing out at the end of parties but now she does it in the homes of ambassadors and in ballrooms on the Wilhelmstrasse. A friend of Goering, no less. Who as we all know does love a pretty girl.’

‘Helene’s a Nazi?’ Wolfgang replied.

‘Oh yes,’ said Helmut, ‘and not from convenience either. She’s not like me, I’m just a fair weather National Socialist, but she’s the real thing. She’s besotted with the whole business. Loves it. The flags, the uniforms. The power. She honestly believes that Germany’s woken up. From what and to what she never really explains. It’s just woken up that’s all, new dawn, young nation, pure blood. The lot. She’s hysterically in love with Adolf, of course, but then so many otherwise perfectly sensible women are. They dream of him marching into their boudoirs and ordering them sternly to bed where they will lie back rigidly to attention with right arm outstretched while he tells them that it’s his unalterable will that he ravishes them. Honestly, I bow to no one in my appreciation of male beauty but that one I really can not see.’

Wolfgang thought back to the Helene he had known. Young and bright and intelligent. In love with fashion and fun. And now she was in love with Hitler.

‘She was a fashion buyer for Isaac Fischer,’ Wolfgang said.

‘Well, the Jews enslaved us all before the awakening, don’t you know,’ Helmut said with a smile.

Wolfgang almost smiled too. Helmut didn’t care what he joked about; he never had.

‘She was such a free spirit,’ Wolfgang went on. ‘And a good heart, too, I know she was. We laughed together all the time. She loved The Sheik of Araby and Avalon . Doesn’t she mind ? I mean about all the hatred and violence.’

‘She doesn’t think about it, dear. And if she did, she’d think it was all lies, just Jewish moaning and a few sweet, over-excited SA boys getting carried away. People like Helene are having too much fun to want any of this to stop. Everyone is having too much fun. Every day another parade assuring us that we’re better than everyone else in the whole world, so invigorating. You can see why people love it, surely? I mean if Adolf had decided to pick on, say, left-handed people and let Jews join his gang, you’d be strutting about with everybody else, wouldn’t you?’

‘I hope not. Not me. But I’m sure plenty would. Of course it wouldn’t happen though. It’s always the Jews who get it. It’s why we’re here.’

‘Apropos of which, Wolfgang,’ Helmut said, producing a pen and a little leather notebook on which a swastika was embossed, ‘I’m going to write down my telephone number for you. If you need help, and of course you will, you may call me. Be discreet, of course, when you explain yourself, but I promise that I will do what I can for you, for friendship, you know, for old times’ sake.’ Helmut tore the piece of paper from his book and got to his feet. ‘And now I’m afraid I must go. I fear I have a long long night on the train ahead. I’d only popped into your little bar to see if I could pick up a bit of company for the journey. Love a bit of fresh trade, you know, can never resist the lure of the new, but now I fear I shall just have to read a book.’